Maybe we should sally back to the dayworld.

Sally it is.

We seem to have misplaced the metaphysical.

Probably just as well.

Do you think that the sense of self is an illusion?

Well. I think you know that the consensus among the neural folk is yes. I think it’s a dumb question. Coherent entities composed of a great number of disparate parts arent—as a general rule—thereby assumed to have their identities compromised. I know that seems to be ignoring our sense of ourselves as a single being. The “I.” I just think it’s a silly way of viewing things. If we were constructed with a continual awareness of how we worked we wouldnt work. You might even ask that if the self is indeed an illusion for whom then is it illusory? I thought we were going to ditch the mind for a while?

Fair enough. You were raised by your grandmother from the age of what? Twelve?

Yes.

Are you estranged from her?

No. Of course not.

But you’ve had your differences.

She didnt know what to do with me. It wasnt her fault. I didnt either. I thought when I left for college she’d breathe a sigh of relief. I was too preoccupied with my own problems to see hers. She drove me to the bus station in Knoxville. I had one suitcase and it was mostly books. I turned on the platform to hug her and she was crying and I realized that she was terrified.

Terrified.

Yes.

For you.

For me. Yes.

You were how old?

I was fourteen.

You left the university after two years.

Yes. I’d graduated.

In two years.

Plus the summers. It wasnt hard. I was admitted to the doctoral program but then I packed up and moved to Tucson Arizona. I worked in a bar at night and did math all day.

When did you sleep?

I slept about five hours a day. Four.

You werent old enough to tend bar. You werent old enough to even be in a bar.

I had the bogus driver’s license.

Where was the Kid?

He showed up after a while. My little dybbuk and his friends. My brother had given me a car and I used to drive up into the mountains and sit with my feet in the creek and work problems in algebraic topology. I’d read Noether’s papers and they were pretty straightforward. Poincaré of course. What the Betti groups actually meant. The homology groups. But it was how she got there. Aside from the fact that she knew more abstract algebra than anybody else. I knew that in order to do what she’d done you would first have to believe it. But this seemed different. Intuition is a tough nut to crack. The cool thing about topology is that the problems you are working on are not about something else. Your hope is that in solving them they will explain to you why you were asking them. You’re tracking down the affine. Can you really stretch a surface any way you like? What if you stretched it to infinity? The width would narrow infinitely. Can the limits of the infinitesimal be approached forever? The mathematics may say yes but you dont believe it. Infinite extension is just more of the same but infinite contraction seems to present a different set of problems. In the classical understanding. You’re in Zeno land. Begin again and concentrate.